Generation and maintenance of technical manuals has been a very difficult and expensive task in the past and will become more expensive as system complexity continues to increase. Technical manuals have been created manually by a group of experienced people with deep knowledge of a system. For complex systems like higher-level electronic controllers, engine or whole vehicle, the process of compilation of technical manual will take a long time and the result will be a manual that does not fully utilize the observable symptoms to optimize troubleshooting. After a manual is created, it has to be reviewed to remove as many discrepancies as possible and ensure that all possible failures are covered and that for each failure all necessary tests and maintenance procedures are included. Much of this work has to be repeated for each update of the design of the system.
The entire process is error prone because of human mistakes since the whole work is done manually. The technical manuals are mainly stored as PDF, MS Word, MS Excel and textual artifacts, so the content is not easily integrated to a level of fidelity to support automated inference. The manual creation of technical documentation is time consuming, expensive, difficult to maintain, and requires a deep system knowledge.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a method to quickly, accurately and cheaply create technical manuals for complex systems. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.